The warm bipartisan welcome accorded to Prime Minister Narendra Modi by President Joe Biden and the American establishment on his latest visit to the United States is indicative of belated awareness in India and the US that the two countries are natural allies with common interests and objectives. That this awareness dawned on both countries so late is a tragedy rooted in the anti-Americanism of British-educated Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi who shared the disdain of upper class Britons for class-agnostic Americans.
Therefore, despite the plainly obvious commonalities shared by the US and India — democracy, free and fair elections, independent judiciary and the seven freedoms (Article 19 of the Constitution) — although professing neutrality in the American-Soviet Cold War of 1945-89, successive Nehru-Indira administrations tilted towards the Soviet Union on big global issues.
Yet perhaps the greatest signal of their Soviet bias was junking of the subcontinent’s historic ideology of private enterprise and free markets in favour of Soviet-inspired central planning, promotion of capital-intensive public sector enterprises (PSEs) and suppression of private business and industry.
Instead of learning from America and adopting a free markets economy (which communist China did in 1978), national savings were canalised into government-run PSEs managed by business illiterate bureaucrats and clerks who quickly ran them into the ground. The promised profits from PSEs which according to India’s Soviet Gosplan-style five-year plans would generate surpluses to fund public education and health, never materialised, plunging high-potential post-independence India into the nether ranks of the world’s poorest and most illiterate nations.
Against this backdrop, the reset in US-India relations evidenced by the unprecedented red carpet rolled out for Prime Minister Modi and tall promises of technology transfers, US investment in trade and education are most welcome. Quite obviously, India needs to thoroughly cleanse the Augean stables of licence-permit-quota raj and get back on to the capitalist road as communist China did 40 years ago, to record extraordinary annual rates of double-digit GDP growth.
And there can be no better partner in this national re-engineering than the US which since the Second World War has retained its position as the world’s wealthiest, most secure and freest democratic country. As a result of foolish economic development policies, contemporary India with annual GDP of $3.75 trillion is at a severe disadvantage compared with hostile neighbour China ($19 trillion).
To catch up and realise the high potential of the world’s youngest nation, there cannot be a better partner than our fellow democratic country, the United States of America. When the US extended its hand in friendship seven decades ago, the opportunity was missed. We should not miss it again.
